Board 3 Calls For Traffic Cops At 73rd St.-37th Ave.

An ad hoc community group with a message of distress, an established community group with a message of gladness and a national governmental organization with news for business provided the speakers at the March meeting of Community Board 3. After hearing them, the board took up a report from its business and economic development committee that eventually produced a dispute about a committee item from last month's meeting. Both last month's and this month's meetings were held at Louis Armstrong I.S. 227 in Corona.

The Western Jackson Heights Alliance was recently formed and a few days before the community board meeting, held a rally to protest conditions at the intersection of 73rd Street and 37th Avenue. Spokesman Will Sweeney said hundreds of local residents turned out to protest the congested and unsafe conditions where those two streets meet. The most crying need, he said, was basic traffic enforcement. For one thing, a police officer should be assigned to the intersection on weekends from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Left turns from 73rd Street into 37th Avenue should be banned, he added, and the bus stop at the southwest corner of 73rd Street should be moved to the northwest corner. Jackson Heights is apparently a victim of its own success: great numbers of shoppers and other visitors come in on weekends from as far away as New Jersey and Connecticut, said a woman from the alliance, adding that the situation will only grow worse when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway repair project is completed and access is even easier. Arturo Sanchez, a board member, was impressed by the way alliance members had done their work "like urban planners". He said, however, that additional suggestions about how store deliveries should be made in the vicinity of the intersection have been issued with insufficient regard for the merchants, and better consultation with them is called for.

Man-li Kuo Lin brought her Small Business Administration talk to the board's public information segment. She said that the SBA is the leading lender to small businesses- that is, those having fewer than 500 employees. It is also the leading lender to women and East Asian-American applicants, such as Chinese and Koreans. She promoted the SBA 504 loans as being especially of interest to small businesses in Queens. Businesses that fail, she said, fail mainly for a shortage of money to sustain them. Faulty business skills would be the second biggest cause of failure. Brian Pu Folkes of the New Immigrants' Center for Education (N.I.C.E.), located on 77th Street near 37th Avenue, came to promote the Jackson Heights Film & Food Festival and also to explain how N.I.C.E. provides English as a second language (ESL) classes and what he calls "civic literacy". This includes a Sunday feature called "language swap", where those speaking the several languages of Jackson Heights (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Urdu, Bengali, and there may be more) gather to trade and translate a few terms in each language. This year's JHF&FF is being held Friday through Sunday, September 28 to 30, Pu Folkes said. Friday and Saturday will feature films at Natives, a restaurant at Northern Boulevard and 82nd Street that used to be a movie theatre. The food part of the festival will be held Sunday, September 30 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, at 34th Avenue and 82nd Street.

The business and economic development committee scrutinized two building occupancy applications of Cyber City Computer Internet Café and State Liquor Authority (SLA) wine and beer license applications from two restaurants before entangling itself in a reprise of last month's application from Temptations Night Club Bar at 37-74 103rd St. Cyber City's proprietor was not in attendance, so Arthur Teiler, committee co-chairman, had to explain that the business is opening at two addresses, 38-09 Junction Blvd. and 39-21 103rd St. A vote had to be taken for each of the addresses, and the board approved both unanimously. DePaisa a Paisano Restaurant & Bakery, 39-24 108th St., had two women speaking for it, both of whom had to be translated before the board could understand that two bakers and two cooks work there. One board member said the place had passed a recent inspection. P&S Deli, 100-11 37th Ave., had been a grocery store but has now fully converted to a restaurant. Both were approved by the board, though each drew four No votes. Teiler brought up the matter of Temptations, whose beer and wine application had failed to pass last month, by saying that the applicant, Carlos Ponce, was now revealed as a front for the old owners of the bar (which operated under a different name), who had had their license revoked after being hit with violations repeatedly. He called for another vote, arousing protests from a few who believed Teiler had handled the matter badly. The vote recommended disapproval of the application by a score of 18-5, yet drew nine abstentions from those protesters.

Committee reports included one from parks and another from the Flushing Bay committee. Grace Lawrence, reporting for parks, said the dog run proposed for a space at 35th Avenue and 69th Street is being steered by two organizations, Woodside Democrats and Jackson Heights Dog Owners. She said she'd have more to report in April. Tom Lowenhaupt reported for the Flushing Bay committee by bringing up two different approaches to caring for the welfare of the bay. The first is the standard method of building waste treatment plants, the second is something called source control, which calls for extensive tree planting and setting up a series of parks in an effort to capture rainwater and keep it from flowing into the bay. He said that the issue would be discussed in a meeting at the Olmstead Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (near Arthur Ashe Stadium) at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28.